Lunes, Disyembre 26, 2011

Watch Drive Angry



Drive Angry


Now, balls will get you through the door, andDrive Angry announces itself with some considerable verve: a foul-mouthed monologue by one of Satan’s minions – a character called “The Accountant”, played with consummate panache by William Fichtner; a high speed car-chase through some burg identified as “Laughter, Colorado”; and a spectacularly gory, Mad Max style set-to, in which Cage’s blonde-haired “John Milton” blows away four or five bad-asses, but only after establishing the whereabouts of his baby granddaughter, who we soon learn is to be a human sacrifice performed by a satanic cult leader played by Billy Burke (Kristen’s dad in Twilight).
By now – more or less the time Cage shoots off someone’s hand and sends it careening into the 3D bespectacled audience’s collective lap – we have a strong suspicion that this is going to be the most unapologetic 18-rated movie a major movie star has given us in some time.

That suspicion grows stronger as we’re introduced to Amber Heard’s salty-tongued waitress, Piper, and then her cheating fiancé (played by the movie’s cowriter, Todd Farmer), who she catches in flagrante, as it were.

There are limits of course, this being a studio movie from the US of A. Yes, we can see heads skewered with wooden sticks. Yes we can see eyeballs gouged. Yes we can see Milton shoot half a dozen satanic goons at the same time as he’s playing hide the Chihuahua with some freaked out floozy (but not before one of them sticks his backside with a cattle prod). But the filmmakers tastefully draw the line at full frontal nudity below the waste – because that would be obscene, I guess, and generate the dreaded NC-17 rating in the US. And that would never do, not even for a loud, proud redneckerama drama like this one.What else can I tell you? If you saw Shoot Em Up, you probably felt a shudder of recognition at the description of that violent sex scene. And that’s a bit of a downer, because hard as it tries to shock, Drive Angry keeps coming off as a rehash of a bunch of other movies: Ghost Rider definitely comes to mind, and Jonah Hex, The Prophecy and Mad Max, a bit of Tarantino and a lot of Robert Rodriguez (but it’s not anywhere near as good as those guys). 

The thing is, Lussier and Farmer have ripped off some good stuff, but they don’t have much of a clue how to fit it all together. So the movie just judders to a halt between the set pieces, and frankly, most of the set pieces aren’t all that either. The 3D disguises his ineptitude a little, but Lussier is out of his depth when it comes to putting a complicated action sequence together. Like too many of today’s Bay-acolytes, he cuts fast but he cuts sloppy. What works: Fichtner is excellent, a suave emissary providing the larger than life performance the movie badly needs and (surprisingly) doesn’t get from Cage, who seems to be going through the motions this time. Also surprisingly good: Amber Heard, who comes out swinging and keeps on slugging.  And I guess the 3D, which seems of a piece with the tackiness of the enterprise, even though it comes with the heavy price of butt-ugly cinematography. 

What doesn’t: a story that feels stretched the way those cliffhanger serials used to back in the olden days. And pretty much everything else, though they might say that’s intentional.
Ideally see it at a drive-in after half a dozen cold ones. I know, I know: that’s both impossible and socially irresponsible. But there you have it.
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Watch Source Code




Source Code



With his debut movie Moon, Duncan Jones made a mighty leap; now with this superb follow-up, he has hit the ground sprinting. Source Code is a terrifically exciting and hugely enjoyable sci-fi thriller, written by Ben Ripley. For pure entertainment, there's nothing around to touch it.Source Code is about conspiracies, altered minds and altered states, far-fetched in the most elegant and Hitchcockian way, and the sheer outrageousness of it all is muscular and streamlined. The film is about modified reality and inner space, and there are points of comparison with Christopher Nolan's Inception. But the world of Source Code seems to me more interesting, and more able to incubate real drama, real suspense and even some real humour.
At its centre is Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a US army helicopter pilot who has crashed in Afghanistan. When he comes to, he finds himself in civilian clothes aboard a crowded commuter train arriving slightly late into Chicago on a glorious summer morning. He appears to be in someone else's body: that of a suburban teacher. Opposite him sits Christina (Michelle Monaghan) who behaves as if a brief nap has merely interrupted their highly flirtatious conversation, but she is then increasingly alarmed as Colter, wild-eyed and panicky, demands to know what is happening and what is going on.
After eight minutes, a catastrophic event then hurls Colter back into a situation that is in some ways even more perplexing. He is in uniform, injured and immobilised in what appears to be part of a wrecked military aircraft. Is this real? Or is it the train that's real? Through a video monitor, he must communicate with a woman who is evidently now his commanding officer. Goodwin, played by Vera Farmiga, treats him with the same unreadable solicitousness as Kevin Spacey's robot-voice did with Sam Rockwell in Moon.
Without consenting, Colter has evidently been dragooned into a new mission using futurist technology known as "source code"; he has been brought back from Afghanistan – or has he? – and ordered to relive the past eight minutes on a Chicago commuter train over and over again until he discovers vital information. Ripley and Jones show how each metaphysical go-around discloses more clues; each makes Colter fall for Christina a little more, and each makes the thought of losing her seem more unbearable.
With its train setting and Chris Bacon's score imitating the jagged clamour of Bernard Herrmann, the movie is clearly indebted to the Hitchcock of North By Northwest and Strangers on a Train. But it's also a particularly tense and fraught kind of Groundhog Day, and just as in that film, repetition endows banal, forgettable events with an eerie familiarity and inevitability.
Yet in the Bill Murray movie, our hapless hero had all the time in the world, an infinity of time, as many Groundhog Days as he needed, to learn the piano until he was at the level at which he could casually appear to be a brilliant pianist to impress a woman. Making an impression on a woman is not wholly absent from Colter's mind either, but he can't just repeat his eight minutes ad infinitum, because the security situation is pressing and time is running out. Each time he starts again, his own physical condition in the mysterious cockpit deteriorates, and Goodwin and her shadowy boss Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) are keeping secrets from him.
Source Code is glitzy and hi-tech in a 21st-century way, but also has something from an earlier age: it is a story from the Twilight Zone, with hints of Philip K Dick, and traces of the television world of The Prisoner and The Fugitive. With its weird deployment of playing cards in one scene, Jones has channelled The Manchurian Candidate – perhaps specifically through Jonathan Demme's Iraq-themed remake – and the overall effect is smart and to the point.
In its own way, Source Code also aspires slightly to the status of comedy, and Colter's increasingly wan and desperate conversations with Goodwin from his mysterious pod reminded me a little of David Niven's radio conversations with Kim Hunter's June in A Matter of Life and Death – as he plummets to his certain death, Niven's character exploits his prerogative as a dying man to flirt with this radio operator.
This isn't exactly what is happening here, and Colter's affections are engaged with Christina, not Goodwin – but equipoised with the action and thrills, there is a serio-comic sense of fantasy and romance that have been endangered by this terrifying situation in one sense, but in another sense made possible by it. Source Code is absurd, but carries off its absurdity lightly and stylishly. It is a luxuriously enjoyable film. Jones has put himself into the front-rank of Hollywood directors, the kind who can deliver a big studio picture with brains. With twists and turns, and at breathtaking speed, this film runs on rails.
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Watch Johnny English Reborn



Johnny English Reborn



Like any international spy movie worth its salt, "Johnny English Reborn" boasts helicopter stunts, exotic locations, choreographed fighting and nifty gadgets. But because this is a comedy starring gifted British comic actor Rowan Atkinson, what's more memorable (and hilariously so) is the simplest form of decorum-puncturing mayhem: an adjustable office chair that won't stop adjusting during a meeting with the prime minister. Atkinson's agent acts as if nothing untoward is happening in a sequence that's entirely reminiscent of his forebear Peter Sellers staring at that ever-unrolling toilet paper in "The Party."

MI-7 agent English is the newer bumbler in Atkinson's canon, after rubbery Everyman Mr. Bean, last seen in the 2007 comedy "Mr. Bean's Holiday." Good-natured Bean's speechless, innocent shenanigans may be more classically iconic, but English — introduced in the 2003 worldwide hit "Johnny English" — gives Atkinson a chance to add to his prodigious slapstick abilities a well-honed gift (seen to best effect on the BBC sitcom "Black Adder") for hundred-yard-stare arrogance and a withering baritone.
The gangly performer can combine the two in the subtlest of ways for brilliant effect, and it's often the saving grace in what is an otherwise routine vehicle for Atkinson's talents. So while a Tibetan mountain prologue setting up English's long exile from Her Majesty's Secret Service spits out the requisite kung fu training gags, it's watching the actor's stoic mug develop a twitchy eye — sparked by anyone referring to the failed mission that ruined his reputation — that brings the most delicately silly comic pleasure.
Elsewhere, writer Hamish McColl' and director Oliver Parker attempt to update spoof elements to reflect recent trends in spy movies, namely the parkour action of "Casino Royale" and the "Bourne" movies: faced with a roof-hopping, wall-scaling villain, English casually takes the elevator. Then there's the real-life privatization of government, which leads to one of the better jokes, that MI-7 is now "Toshiba British Intelligence."
The story, though, is a hodgepodge of espionage flick tropes. Coming in from the cold, English and an eager young sidekick (Daniel Kaluuya) are tasked by the chief (Gillian Anderson) to uncover an assassination ring plotting to take out the Chinese premier. Along the way our hero feels the competition from a smooth-talking, hot-shot agent (Dominic West); develops a fondness for a fetching behavioral psychologist (Rosamund Pike); and has disastrous run-ins with an elderly assassin whose weapon is a tricked-out vacuum cleaner.
But all that matters with efforts like this is whether the cookie-cutter plotting serves up enough situations for Atkinson to contort himself into and out of jams. After all, are the narratives what you remember from the "Pink Panther" movies? Or the silly things, like that Clouseau could so easily get his finger caught in a spinning globe?
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Watch Captain America The First Avenger



Captain America The First Avenger



Evans has gone the Marvel route before, playing Johnny Storm/The Human Torch in a pair of "Fantastic Four" movies. But as Steve Rogers, a weak young man who gets turned into the husky Captain America by a dose of Super-Soldier Serum, this part brings out an appealing earnestness and humility in the actor that is certainly not business as usual in the comic book superhero genre.
"Captain America" is not just set during World War II. As the first comic book in what was to become the Marvel universe, it actually dates to March 1941, months before America's entry into the conflict, and its cover of the captain cold-cocking Adolf Hitler apparently turned some heads back in the day.
Though it begins and ends with a scene or two in the present, as directed by Joe Johnston from a screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, "Captain America" is first and foremost an origins story. Almost half of the film's running time elapses before Rogers gets any kind of power at all, and though its elements are awfully familiar, it's the most involving part of the film because it takes advantage of Evans' performance.
These early-days sections are so old-fashioned that, if you take away the copious special effects, watching "Captain America" feels akin to watching the venerable 1950s television version of "Superman" starring George Reeves. Buttons are pushed, dials are turned, secret passwords are uttered and lights blink, just like they did way back when.
We first meet Steve Rogers as the classic 98-pound weakling, a young man so determined to join the Army like best buddy Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) that he keeps trying to enlist even though the armed services keep turning him down.
Impressed by his gumption, if not his physique, is émigré scientist Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci with an accent and Albert Einstein hair) of the government's super secret Strategic Scientific Reserve.
Erskine developed the Super-Soldier Serum but fled his homeland because the Nazis wanted to get their hands on it. The good doctor knows that because the drug amplifies "all that is inside you," potential super soldiers must be pure of heart. Which Steve Rogers definitely is.
The Americans, wouldn't you know it, are not the only people with super soldiers on their minds. The Third Reich, led by a renegade officer named Johann Schmidt (an expert Hugo Weaving) is also in the market, but it is going about it in a somewhat different way.
Schmidt is the top man in HYDRA, the Nazi's occult research arm, and early in the film we see him somewhere in Norway making off with a mysterious green object, "the jewel of Odin's treasure room." That turns out to be an energy source so phenomenal it could pulverize the world.
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Watch Cowboy and Aliens


Cowboy and Aliens 


Galloping across the desert, his inscrutable baby blues fixed on the horizon, Daniel Craig makes for a surprisingly convincing cowboy. Some actors, including a few in his new movie, “Cowboys & Aliens,”look too modern for old-timey roles. There isn’t enough grit, suffering and poor nutrition in their faces, and their gestures and gaits are timed to the impatient rhythms of the information age. But Mr. Craig, with his brutally handsome face and coiled physicality, looks like a rawhide whip that’s just itching to get cracking.He does, eventually, though it takes the director, Jon Favreau, a long time to wake up his movie, giving it a good kick about a half-hour in. Maybe it’s all the western clichés he had to line up, including the dusty town, the gun-toting preacher, the mild-mannered doctor, the trigger-happy scion of a powerful cattleman adored by the American Indian orphan who would make him a better son. Don’t forget the surrogate for this PG-13 picture’s presumptive audience, a wide-eyed boy whom you half expect to cry out for Shane. And then there’s the faithful pooch that in one scene yelps when (finally!) he encounters a genre-hopping extraterrestrial with razored lobster claws that looks like a cousin of the monsters from the “Alien” films.
That these new beasties even evoke the nightmarish creatures originally created by the artist H. R. Giger  is a testament to his genius and to this movie’s lack of imagination. It’s too bad. Mr. Favreau, who directed the “Iron Man” films, isn’t an innovator, but he can have a nice, light touch, and his actors always seem as if they were happy to be there, which is true here too. Here, though, he wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror. (The title may mean little to young viewers, who, like the niece and nephew of a friend, don’t watch westerns and were puzzled about why this isn’t called “Cowboys vs. Aliens.”)
The movie is distilled from a comic-book world cooked up by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg  that was transformed into a platitude-heavy script by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby from a screen story by — let me catch my breath — Mr. Ostby, Mr. Fergus and Steve Oedekerk. That’s a lot of writers (some with very fine credits) for a movie in which a woman lovingly reassures her bullied man that he has nothing to prove (meaning that he sure does, as the finale reveals), and in which Mr. Craig’s character says — drinking at a saloon bar with his back to the sheriff — that he doesn’t want any trouble. He doesn’t, kind of. But, gee, I bet he would have liked a better line.
As Jake, Mr. Craig happily doesn’t need to say much at first, entering in near-Daniel-Day-Lewis mysterioso silence, popping into the frame as if waking from a nightmare. He’s bloodied and dazed, but his bearings return as soon as he’s set upon by bandits whom he quickly disarms, unpants and deboots. He makes his way to a town where he finds a preacher, Meacham (Clancy Brown), who sews up a weird wound for him, and takes on a drunk, Percy (Paul Dano), who makes the saloonkeeper-sawbones, Doc (Sam Rockwell), dance by gunfire. And, in the role of Miss Kitty  or, actually, Ella: Olivia Wilde, whose bleachy-white teeth and manicured brows are strictly Beverly Hills 90210 rather than New Mexico Territory 1875.
Just around the time that the sleepy town threatens to become sleepier, a cluster of small spaceships zips out of the nighttime sky, simultaneously laying waste to the area and stirring your interest. (An earlier, visually obscured attack turns some cattle and their keepers into barbecue.) It’s an effectively staged, attention-grabbing scene, with the ships darting in and out of the darkness, smoke and fireball bursts, as the panicked, shrieking citizenry zigzags below. Amid the clamor there’s a nice pocket of relative quiet when Jake, who’s been detained, suddenly realizes that the strange, metallic bracelet locked on his left wrist has a purpose, an epiphany that turns him into a cowboy with a zap gun.
Soon after Jake figures it out, though, townsfolk have been snatched by the aliens, yanked up by long, tentaclelike appendages that flick out of the spaceships and seize prey as easily as frogs gobble flies. If you’ve seen a few cinematic oaters or just about any them-vs.-us movie, you know what happens next: Strangers join forces as they take off after the villains, who just happen to be extraterrestrials, but might as well be Russians or Nazis, given their bland back story. There is one surprise that nearly saves a laughable character and some wishful thinking with some super-accommodating Apaches that, even in the service of a cinematic fantasy, rankles. As the cattleman, Harrison Ford looks totally cranky but is also pretty swell.
Mr. Ford’s presence, along with that of Steven Spielberg (he’s an executive producer) makes you wonder what Mr. Spielberg would have done with this material, though maybe the better question is what Mr. Favreau would have done differently without him. “Cowboys & Aliens” is, with “Super 8,” yet another summer release Mr. Spielberg has blessed with his imprimatur, perhaps not to the advantage of either. (His name is also on the latest “Transformers,” but let us not speak of that.) It isn’t just that he is a veritable genre and brings a legacy and specific filmmaking ideas with him; it’s also that J. J. Abrams, who directed “Super 8,” and Mr. Favreau, each a pop adept, have skewed heavier and less loose with the Great Man on board, as if awed by his genius instead of his early gift for fun.
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Linggo, Disyembre 25, 2011

Watch Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Full Movie


Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn [Full Movie]

Story: After a fairy tale wedding, Edward Cullen ( Robert Pattinson) and Bella Swan ( Kristen Stewart) depart for an equally delectable honeymoon to a desolate destination. The honeymoon is however short lived when Bella discovers she is pregnant and a half-vampire kid is on its way. Her frail body can barely cope up with her fast mutating body and to add to the couple's troubles there are the aggressive werewolves who are hellbent to stop the advent of the new arrival. Can old buddy Jacob ( Taylor Lautner) save the situation? More importantly, can Edward and Bella become proud parents to a new species... 


Movie Review: It's the aura and the sanctity of the storybook wedding between the pallid and princely vampire, Edward and the equally pallid, yet loyal Bella that sets the note of the film. The high schoolers are now mature adults, ready to step into a new world. And they do it with all the tentativeness and aspirations of two people who are hopelessly in love and desperate not to hurt each other. The wedding, attended by the vampire family and Bella's clan is a languid, prolonged affair, interrupted by some high drama when a furious Jacob tries to vent his grief and anger against the alliance that he feels will end in tragedy. Yet again, Bella's attempts to comfort and convince Jacob hold more passion than her kisses with Cullen! 
Then comes the honeymoon. It's a bed-breaking affair between a vampire who's waited almost a century to lose his virginity and a girl who's been determined to hold on to her chastity till marriage. Can't blame them really for the unbridled onrush of hormones... But trouble threatens to brew when strange marks begin to appear on Bella's slender frame. Time for temperance again. The duo engage in all kinds other pursuits for diversion, like extended games of chess and flying soirees in lush green forests followed by daring plunges in waterfalls that are beyond human reach. Exotica, anyone? So far, so good, for everyone, except Jacob who howls his way in anguish, envy and desolation. But peace in paradise is once again short lived as Bella falls prey to morning sickness and discovers she's on her way to motherhood. Is a monster on its way? Specially since the foetus is growing too fast and furious. 


Chapter three: parenthood. This is the time to step into adulthood and face adult questions. Should the couple look forward to parenthood despite their fears of the unknown species that is on its way and the threat to Bella's life or should the magical myth of motherhood prevail, any which way? No prizes for guessing the answer, for hasn't Bella always been a paragon of virtue. All of Edward's concerns and Jacob's rantings and ravings cannot change her mind: my baby, not me, even if it means getting her first taste of blood, the vampire elixir. 


If you view Breaking Dawn Part 1 basically as a prequel to the hell and high drama that is about to break through in part two, then rest assured, you shall have no problem with the pace of the film. But if you look at it as an entity in itself, the inordinately slow pace and extended length of the film can bog you down. Of course, there is enough to keep the momentum on, specially in the second half and most of the tension and drama centers round a restless and skeptical Jacob's misgivings, torn desperately between love and vengeance. But there isn't high adrenalin action to spice up the drama, other than the threatening pack of werewolves who remain on the periphery. Edward and Bella do hold their ground in their more adult avatar and the climax sets the tone for a dhamakedaar.


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Watch Thor


THOR



In the other corner are the mighty monarchs of Marvel Entertainment, a well-oiled mass entertainment machine boasting ownership of more than 8,000 comic book characters and more than $6.1 billion in worldwide box office grosses.
So how did the match turn out? Was Kenny B. sucker-punched and steam-rollered by the commercial demands of the Marvel mastodons, or did the crafty creator bring a touch of class to Marvel's story set amid the all-powerful gods and goddesses of Norse mythology?
Believe it or not, all this commotion ends in a draw.
For despite all the hype, despite the $150-million budget, despite a post-shooting 3-D conversion, despite stars like Oscar winners Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins and hunky young Australian Chris Hemsworth as the God of Thunder himself, what we have here is an aesthetic standoff between predictable elements and unexpected ones. "Thor" has its strengths, but it is finally something of a mishmash with designs on being more interesting than it manages to be.
Part of "Thor's" artistic confusion and lack of unity can be attributed to its having not only two different settings but two completely different tones, which in turn may be partly because of it having no fewer than five credited writers (screenplay by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz and Don Payne, story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich).
The first setting is the fictional town of Puente Antiguo, N.M., where feisty astrophysicist Jane Foster (Portman) and a pair of scientific colleagues (Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings) are tracking some wacky atmospheric phenomenon in the nighttime desert sky when Jane accidentally whacks Thor with her pickup truck. "Do me a favor," Jane says to the man on the ground, "and don't be dead." Talk about your cute meets.
To explain how the Norse God of Thunder ended up disoriented in the American desert, the film takes us for an extended interlude to the magical world of Asgard, home of Thor, his father, King Odin, (Hopkins) and Thor's clever brother Loki (fine young British actor Tom Hiddleston).
Though he is the heir to Odin's throne, Thor on his home turf is revealed to be a violence-prone warrior with serious anger management problems. When Asgard's traditional enemies, the tall and troublesome Frost Giants, cause difficulty, Thor is all for teaching them and their malevolent King Laufey (Colm Feore) a lesson they won't forget.
This does not work out as planned, and the big guy and his mighty hammer Mjolnir end up banished to Earth, where Thor no longer has special powers and has to walk around saying things like "I need sustenance" when he gets hungry.
Anchored by a solid performance by Hopkins, who has said the story energized him, the Asgard sections are "Thor's" most substantial, with Branagh likely having had something Shakespearean in mind with his portrayal of the conflict between an unbending father and his headstrong son.
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